The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics 9781478022978

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THE MEXICO R EA DER H istory , C ulture , P olitics S econd E dition, revised and updated Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson, editors

Duke University Press­  Durham and London  2022

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Praise for the First Edition of The Mexico Reader “This volume is a most sincere attempt to depict Mexico in all its complexity, an object carried out superbly and in an altogether unprecedented fashion. Very seldom has a reader, an analytically challenged subgenre by definition, done as much justice to any Latin American country.”—­Héctor D. Fernández L’Hoeste, The Latin Americanist “The Mexico Reader presents a diverse, original, and rare collection of primary and secondary texts. . . . The Mexico Reader is poised to become a highly prized collection of texts that any instructor will want to use and any student of Mexico will enjoy reading.”—­Juliette Levy, New Mexico Historical Review “[The Mexico Reader] could be the foundation of an exciting course. . . . You will not find a more varied or fearless introductory volume to Mexican Studies. . . . The most impressive aspect of the volume is the variety of voices it reveals. . . . Remarkable.”—­Timothy E. Anna, ­H-­LatAm, H-­Net Reviews “[A] careful selection of articles and texts that cover a wide variety of subjects. . . . The collection can be understood as a survey of intellectual culture in Mexico from a historical perspective, allowing readers to understand how Mexican reality has been conformed, transformed, and adapted. Recommended.”—­M. R. Lara, Choice “Three layers of introductions—­for the volume, for each section and for each text—­provide necessary contextual information, while highlighting emerging themes. Thanks in part to these excellent introductions, students and teachers of Mexico will find that this volume could supplant textbook histories, while giving students access to hundreds of pages of primary sources, well-­ chosen images and two photo-­ essays.”—­Patience A. Schnell, Journal of Latin American Studies “For any journey through Mexican history, politics, social movements, and popular culture, travelers should start with this fascinating collection. Expertly edited and translated, each document adds to the rich landscape and each is cogently introduced to the reader. The perfect source book for any college course on Mexico from the Aztecs and Mayas to the twenty-­fi rst century.”—­John H. Coatsworth, Columbia University “Teachers will find a tremendous wealth of material in this new anthology, allowing them to choose selections supporting a wide range of historical approaches. . . . This volume will make a thought-­provoking read.”—­Jeffrey M. Pilcher, The Americas

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The Mexico Reader

S econd E dition

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© 2022 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­f ree paper ∞ Typeset in Monotype Dante by BW&A Books Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­P ublication Data Names: Joseph, G. M. (Gilbert Michael), [date] editor. | Henderson, Timothy J., editor. Title: The Mexico reader : history, culture, politics / Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson, editors. Other titles: Latin America readers. Description: Second edition, revised and updated. | Durham : Duke University Press, 2022. | Series: The Latin America readers | Includes index. | Includes translations from Spanish. Identifiers: lccn 2021042999 (print) lccn 2021043000 (ebook) isbn 9781478015734 (hardcover) isbn 9781478018360 (paperback) isbn 9781478022978 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Mexico—History. | Mexico—Social conditions. | Mexico—Economic conditions. | bisac: history / Latin America / Mexico | travel / Mexico Classification: lcc f1226 .m53 2022 (print) | lcc f1226 (ebook) | ddc 972—dc23/eng/20211112 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021042999 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021043000 Cover art: Young Mexican women dressed as La Catrina take part in Day of the Dead festivities in Oaxaca, Mexico, October 31, 2019. © Jan Sochor. Courtesy of the artist.

Dedicated to the memory of Patricia Pessar

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Contents

Acknowledgments xv A Note on Style  xvii Introduction 1

I  The Search for “Lo Mexicano”  11 The Mexican Character, Joel Poinsett 13 The Cosmic Race, José Vasconcelos  17 The Sons of La Malinche, Octavio Paz 22 The Problem of National Culture, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla 30 How to Tame a Wild Tongue, Gloria Anzaldúa 34 Mexico City 1992, Alma Guillermoprieto  45 Two Ranchera Songs, José Alfredo Jiménez and Cuco Sánchez 56

II  Ancient Civilizations  59 The Origins of the Aztecs, Anonymous 61 The Feast of the Flaying of Men, Inga Clendinnen 64 The Totocalli (Motecuhzoma’s “Zoo”), Andrés Bustamante Agudelo and Israel Elizalde Méndez 69 The Meaning of Maize for the Maya, J. Eric Thompson 81 Omens Foretelling the Conquest, Anonymous 86

III  Conquest and Colony  89 The Spaniards’ Entry into Tenochtitlán, Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Hernán Cortés 91 Cortés and Montezuma, J. H. Elliott 99 The Battles of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco, Anonymous 103 The Spiritual Conquest, Fray Jerónimo de Mendieta 108 Why the Indians Are Dying, Alonso de Zorita 116 A Baroque Archbishop-­Viceroy, Irving Leonard 125 On Men’s Hypocrisy, Sor Juana 137 xi

Whites, Negroes, and Castes, Alexander von Humboldt 141 The Itching Parrot, the Priest, and the Subdelegate, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi 144

IV  Trials of the Young Republic  153 The Siege of Guanajuato, Lucas Alamán 155 Sentiments of the Nation, or Points Outlined by Morelos for the Constitution, José María Morelos 166 Plan of Iguala, Agustín de Iturbide 169 Women and War in Mexico, Frances Calderón de la Barca 173 The Glorious Revolution of 1844, Guillermo Prieto 182 Décimas Dedicated to Santa Anna’s Leg, Anonymous 189 A Conservative Profession of Faith, The Editors of El Tiempo  192 Considerations relating to the Political and Social Situation of the Mexican Republic in the Year 1847, Mariano Otero  197 Liberals and the Land, Luis González y González 209 Standard Plots and Rural Resistance, Raymond B. Craib 216 Offer of the Crown to Maximilian, Junta of Conservative Notables 226 A Letter from Mexico, Empress Carlota 228 The Triumph of the Republic, 1867, Benito Juárez 233 Porfirio Díaz Visits Yucatán, Channing Arnold and Frederick J. Tabor Frost 236 Scenes from a Lumber Camp, B. Traven 241 President Díaz, Hero of the Americas, James Creelman 247 Gift of the Skeletons, Anonymous 254

Special Section  What Can Photographs Tell Us about Mexico’s History?, John Mraz  257

V  Revolution  277 Land and Liberty, Ricardo Flores Magón 279 Plan of Ayala, Emiliano Zapata and Others 283 The Restoration of the Ejido, Luis Cabrera 288 Zapatistas in the Palace, Martín Luis Guzmán 295 Mexico Has Been Turned into a Hell, William O. Jenkins 300 Pancho Villa, John Reed 306 La Punitiva, Anonymous 314 Pedro Martínez, Oscar Lewis 317 Amelio Robles’s Gender Battles in the Zapatista Army, Gabriela Cano 328 Juan the Chamula, Ricardo Pozas 338 The Constitution of 1917: Articles 27 and 123  348 xii  Contents

An Agrarian Encounter, Rosalie Evans 353 Ode to Cuauhtémoc, Carlos Pellicer 356 The Socialist abc ’s, Anonymous 361 The Ballad of Valentín of the Sierra, Anonymous  367 Mexico Must Become a Nation of Institutions and Laws, Plutarco Elías Calles 370 The Formation of the Single-­Party State, Carlos Fuentes 375 The Rough-­and-­Tumble Career of Pedro Crespo, Gilbert M. Joseph and Allen Wells  377 A Convention in Zacapu, Salvador Lemus Fernández 387 The Agrarian Reform in La Laguna, Fernando Benítez 393 The Oil Expropriation, Josephus Daniels 399

VI  The Perils of Modernity  403 They Gave Us the Land, Juan Rulfo  407 Mexico’s Crisis, Daniel Cosío Villegas  412 Struggles of a Campesino Leader, Rubén Jaramillo 423 Art and Corruption, David Alfaro Siqueiros 433 The Two Faces of Acapulco during the Golden Age, Andrew Sackett 440 The Dark Deeds of “El Negro” Durazo, José González G. 448 The Sinking City, Joel Simon 455 Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl: Souls on the Run, Roberto Vallarino 467 Roma Exposes Mexico’s Darkest Secret, Marcela García 476 Modesta Gómez, Rosario Castellanos 482 La Costa Chica and the Struggles of Mexico’s “Third Root,” Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán  490 Images of Afro-­Mexican Mobilization on the Costa Chica in the 2010s, Various Photographers 494

VII  From the Ruins  499 The Student Movement of 1968, Elena Poniatowska 501 El Santo’s Strange Career, Anne Rubenstein 515 After the Earthquake, Victims’ Coordinating Council 524 Letters to Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Anonymous 534 Identity Hour, or What Photos Would You Take of the Endless City? (From a Guide to Mexico City), Carlos Monsiváis 540 The Political Manifesto of the cocei of Juchitán, Oaxaca, The cocei  546 Women of Juchitán, Jeffrey W. Rubin 550 ezln Demands at the Dialogue Table, Zapatista Army of National Liberation  561

Contents  xiii

A Tzotzil Chronicleof the Zapatista Uprising, Marián Peres Tsu 569 Debtors’ Revenge: The Barzón Movement’s Struggle against Neoliberalism, Heather Williams 583

VIII  The Border and Beyond 595 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Nicholas Trist, Luis Cuevas, Bernardo Couto, and Miguel Atristain 599 Plan of San Diego, Anonymous  604 The “Wetback Invasion,” Timothy J. Henderson 607 The High Cost of Deportation, Julia Preston 616 A Honduran Teenager’s Journey across Borders, Sonia Nazario 627 Two Poems about Immigrant Life, Pat Mora and Gina Valdés  645 The Maquiladora Workers of Juárez Find Their Voice, David Bacon  648 Dompe Days, Luis Alberto Urrea  654 Two Songs about Drug Smuggling, Paulino Vargas and Chalino Sánchez 662 “We Are More American,” Enrique Valencia  665

IX  From the Perfect Dictatorship to an Imperfect Democracy 667 Mexicans Would Not Be Bought, Coerced, Wayne A. Cornelius 679 Assessing nafta : Before and After, Mark Weisbrot and Vicente Fox 682 Ayotzinapa: A Father’s Testimony, John Gibler  687 The Narco Who Died Twice, Ioan Grillo  694 AMLO on Corruption, Andrés Manuel López Obrador  702 The Promise and Peril of López Obrador, Denise Dresser  708 Traditional Medicine in Modern Mexico and the Challenge of covid -­19, Gabriela Soto Laveaga and the Nich Ixim Midwives Movement 718 Should I Die Abroad, Bring Me Back to Mexico, Jorge Ramos  733   Suggestions for Further Reading  737 Acknowledgment of Copyrights and Sources  747 Index 757

xiv  Contents

Acknowledgments

Producing a new edition of a book this big on a country as diverse as ­Mexico —­­a task that now includes integrating the last two extremely consequential decades—­­necessarily incurs many debts. We are grateful to the many friends and colleagues—­­mexicólogos todos—­­who have shared their ideas, enthusiasm, and favorite selections with us over the long haul, ­and taught us a great deal about Mexico in the bargain. We are particularly indebted to those in the new cycle who helped us identify and edit selections, wrote new pieces, customized previous essays, advised on headnotes and captions, or contributed photographs and other graphics: David Brooks, Jürgen Buchenau, Andrés Bustamante Agudelo, Gabriela Cano, the Chiapas Midwives Movement of Nich Ixim (Maize Flower), Ted Cohen, Wayne Cornelius, Ray Craib, Denise Dresser, Israel Elizalde Méndez, Marcela García, Laura Lewis, John Mraz, Karren Pell, Julia Preston, Jeff Rubin, Jan Rus, Andrew Sackett, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Monique Flores Ulysses, Mark Weisbrot, and Heather Williams. We are also grateful to series coeditor Orin Starn and to Gabriela Soto Laveaga, who consulted with us on the new edition’s selections and made many insightful suggestions about new areas of emphasis and particular readings. Gabriela’s assistance in directing us to new writings on Mexican science and indigenous medicine was particularly helpful. Ted Cohen provided equally welcome advice on key sources on Afro­-­Mexican identity and recent political mobilizations. Others provided invaluable research and administrative support. At Duke University Press, Whitney Wingate hunted for appropriate graphics in published sources and online; Peter Delgobbo ably translated several selections, tracked down permissions, and skillfully negotiated licensing fees; and Adhy Dong-­Hyun Kim, Robert Tate, and Joseph Ren assisted Peter in a variety of other tasks that were indispensable in preparing a behemoth of a manuscript for production. Jacqueline Ly ably produced the volume’s index. We also again want to acknowledge the timely financial and research support from several university departments that enabled us to launch the original edition of The Mexico Reader in the early 2000s: the Joint Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Illinois–Champaign and the University of Chicago, the Inter-­Library Loan Department of Auburn University at

xv

Montgomery, and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale University. Finally, we are especially grateful to three gifted and generous colleagues at Duke University Press. The late Valerie Millholland, for decades the press’s beloved senior editor for Latin American studies, invited us to prepare the first edition and did much to facilitate its timely completion. Gisela Fosado, Valerie’s dynamic successor as curator of Duke’s Latin American list and now the press’s editorial director, arranged for the funds and staff support that enabled us to think boldly about the second edition. Last but hardly least, we express enormous gratitude to Miriam Angress, the senior editor assigned to Duke’s World Readers series, who was indispensable in managing challenges and glimpsing opportunities, and who made our work more efficient and rewarding at every turn.

xvi  Acknowledgments

A Note on Style

In doing the translations for this volume we have attempted as much as possible to remain true to both the flavor and meaning of the original text. We have tried to choose English words that are as close as possible to the Spanish counterparts, though translation is an inexact science. In instances where it seemed essential to provide some further explanation, we have used brief and unobtrusive brackets whenever possible. At times, however, a brief endnote was in order. With respect to proper names, we have made a practice of rendering these as they appeared in the original text. Some names—­for example, Moctezuma—­have many different spellings, and several of those spellings appear in the pages to follow. We hope readers will bear with us. Many of the selected texts have been substantially abridged, and for this we offer apologies to the authors. In these cases, the pages of the original from which quotations have been selected appear in the “Acknowledgment of Copyrights and Sources” section.

xvii

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MEXICO

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Monterrey

Tampico PACIFIC

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Guadalajara

Querétaro Puebla

Mexico 100

200

Miles

Map of Mexico.

Mérida

Veracruz

FEDERAL DISTRICT

0

Gulf of Campeche

300

Acapulco

Oaxaca Gulf of Tehuantepec

San Cristóbal de Las Casas

Introduction

Mexico has always exercised a tremendous hold on the imagination of outsiders. Over the centuries, visitors have marveled at its tremendous economic possibilities and been lured by its “exotic,” expressive cultures. Standing atop one of the great pyramids of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City) in 1519, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of the lieutenants of the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés, was barely able to contain his awe at the tableau that spread out before him: We were astounded at the great number of people and the quantities of merchandise, and at the orderliness . . . that prevailed, for we had never seen such a thing before. . . . Every kind of merchandise . . . had its fixed place . . . with dealers in gold, silver, and precious stones, feathers, cloaks, and embroidered goods, and male and female slaves to be sold in the market. .  .  . We saw pyramids and shrines in these cities that looked like gleaming white towers and castles: a marvelous sight to behold.1 Three centuries later, a “scientific conquistador,” the German Alexander von Humboldt (hailed in his time as “the monarch of the sciences”), spent a year of intense investigation in Mexico, then published a book in 1810 that celebrated the virtually boundless economic potential of Mexico’s agricultural and mineral resources. Observing that there was not a single plant in the rest of the world that could not grow in its soil, Baron von Humboldt predicted a bright future for Mexico.2 Almost two hundred years later, in the early 1990s, U.S. political and business leaders regaled the American public with latter-­ day images of a cornucopia of trade and investment that would be realized as soon as the United States ratified nafta (the North American Free Trade Agreement). Mexico’s cultural complex—­that is, both its aesthetic realm and its political culture—­has riveted foreigners at least as much as its enticing landscapes and natural resources. Enlightenment philosophes and nineteenth-­century liberal intellectuals were obsessed by the intriguing mixture of artistic achievement and bloodcurdling brutality—­of “civilization and barbarism”—­ that they saw as the hallmark of Mexico’s pre-­Columbian societies, most notably the Aztec empire. In the aftermath of Mexico’s epic revolution (1910–17), 1

norteamericanos, titillated (and unsettled) by the violent careers of telluric revolutionary chiefs like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata and captivated by revolutionary artists like Diego Rivera, reencountered Mexico, celebrating the cultural and political triumphs of La Revolución. The “enormous vogue of things Mexican” among U.S. artists, intellectuals, and activists in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, played itself out on one level in a “discovery” of Mexico’s “timeless” and exotic popular culture. Rustic songs and dances, folk cuisine and handicrafts, the exuberant murals painted on the walls of public ministries and cantinas alike, “primitive” retablos, and the evocative woodcuts of Mexican revolutionary artist José Guadalupe Posada—­a ll generated a powerful romantic appeal among waves of “revolutionary tourists” disaffected with the excesses of U.S. capitalist society and modernity itself.3 Significantly, the new Mexican revolutionary state did what it could to promote these desires, eager to perpetuate notions of mexicanidad (Mexican-­ness) rooted in an “authentic” mestizo rural culture of which it was the legitimate custodian and beneficiary. In the decades that followed, as postrevolutionary governments “institutionalized” the revolution and “modernized” the country under the aegis of an immovable party, the message that the nation’s leaders wished to convey to the world was that Mexico was now, all at once, cosmopolitan, folkloric, and safe. Thus, the “Amigo Country” was both on the cutting edge of modernization and laid back; capable of staging high-­profile events like the Olympics and the World Cup but also impromptu dawn serenades by mariachis; a mecca simultaneously for high-­powered investors and countercultural (and more recently “eco”) tourists seeking a road less traveled.4 At the turn of the new millennium, one multinational tourist promotion trumpeted the attractions of the “new, exclusive Explorian Resort in tropical Mexico.” Here tourists in the post–Indiana Jones mold could rise early to bask in nature’s secluded, early-­morning splendors; ride motorbikes deep into the recesses of a Mayan jungle, spotting parrots and monkeys and unearthing ancient artifacts and treasures along the way; and then return in the afternoon to sample all the comforts, media, and excitements of a luxurious hotel and sports complex.5 In the world beyond the rhetoric of state builders and tourist promoters, however, modernity has been fraught with perils for Mexico. The Mexico Reader has assembled a wealth of materials that afford the reader an opportunity to reflect on the broader, uneven process whereby Mexico became “modern.” Read together, these selections call into question linear notions of modernization as an inexorable and overwhelming historical current. They show how Mexicans at all points on the social spectrum have both shaped and challenged the content, pace, and direction of modernization. In the process, the anthology unpacks the enduring images of Mexican political economy and culture that many foreigners nurture of Mexico—­images that 2  Introduction

are themselves an important dimension of Mexican history and in whose fashioning both Mexicans and outsiders have often colluded. Still, such cooperation has been uneven, and there have been frequent misunderstandings and painful “discordant encounters.” Over thirty-­five years ago, the longtime New York Times correspondent Alan Riding remarked in his influential book Distant Neighbors that no two countries that share a common border understand each other less than the United States and ­Mexico do6 —­a n observation that eerily rings true as this essay is being written, decades after the onset of nafta , during the age of Donald Trump. At this unsettled juncture it is particularly important for this collection to provide a deeper understanding in the North of our neighbor south of the Rio Grande. Any deeper understanding of Mexico must begin with an acknowledgment that, for all its historic economic potential and its much-­publicized entry into an “integrated” North American economy in the mid-­1990s, Mexico remains closer to its Third World past than to its supposedly inexorable First World destiny. A victim of periodic booms, disastrous meltdowns, fragile recoveries, and a global pandemic in recent decades, Mexico still has a per capita income of less than $10,000 a year, and 55 million of its 130 million citizens live in poverty, according to the Mexican government’s own data. Mexico has become the United States’ largest trading partner (surpassing China and Canada late in 2018, in the midst of President Trump’s escalating trade wars). Mexico has produced fabulous fortunes in business, politics, oil, and the drug trade, with more billionaires in recent decades than any other country save the oil emirates. Still, until as recently as the late 2010s, many tens of thousands of Mexicans were driven to migrate illegally to the United States each year, owing to a dearth of economic opportunities in the countryside or the cities. Quite simply, most Mexicans have remained outside the periodic booms of recent decades while participating fully in the busts that have preceded and followed them. Moreover, despite the pronouncements by Baron von Humboldt and others regarding the country’s agricultural and mineral abundance and the rich cultural endowments of its people, it has always been thus. These perpetual frustrations are partly explained by the country’s history, geography, and politics. Mexico has always presented formidable challenges to economic development and governance, in part owing to the tremendous diversity of its peoples, languages (even today there are still almost sixty indigenous languages spoken), and regions. No doubt the country’s notoriously difficult topography—­particularly the existence of two rugged cordilleras that run from north to south, effectively cutting off the western and eastern portions of the country from the central corridor, while isolating many of the center’s fertile valleys from one another—­has historically played an important role in the regionalization of the country. Even today in an age of globalization, the small farmer of Tamaulipas, who cultivates flat, irrigated fields of sorghum and speaks the mixed Spanish-­English border patois, can Introduction  3

hardly recognize a fellow countryman in the highland campesino of Chia­ pas, who speaks a Maya-­inflected version of castellano, if he speaks Spanish at all, and who tends a miserable plot of corn. In Mexico City, the teeming urban heart of Mexican civilization, high-­r ise buildings loom above colonial churches, which in turn overshadow the blackened ruins of the destroyed indigenous civilization. The city is home to the rich and powerful, but also to shantytown dwellers and street beggars. All of this makes Mexico difficult to grasp as an abstraction; it must be appreciated in its specificity. As the title of Lesley Byrd Simpson’s classic history makes clear, there are indeed “many Mexicos”—­a nd ruling them effectively has never been easy.7 The task of governing Mexico and unleashing its economic potential was made more formidable still by the lingering trauma of the Spanish conquest, and by a colonial legacy of exploitation, racism, and paternalistic authoritarian rule. It was further complicated by the extraordinary economic, political, and ideological power of the Roman Catholic Church, which has played dramatic, ambiguous, and often contradictory roles in the nation’s history. And it was embittered by the fact that, since independence at least, Mexico’s leadership has shown itself determined to doggedly pursue the chimera of “modernity.” Generations of would-­be reformers and social engineers—­ liberals, revolutionaries, and technocrats—­have found themselves repeatedly frustrated by stubborn Mexican realities. It has seemed to them that each time they have had their nation poised to make its debut in the company of “developed,” “First World” countries, they have been blindsided by some manifestation of what anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla has called “México profundo” (the old “deep Mexico”).8 The indigenous rebellion of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas, which followed hot on the heels of the signing of nafta in 1994, is only a relatively recent case in point. And if the modernizers’ hopes have not been undone by recalcitrant internal forces, they have often been dealt the golpe de gracia by the perverse logic of the modern world economy itself, and Mexico’s highly vulnerable, dependent status in it, particularly vis-­à-­vis the United States. Thus, in the 1980s, the oil-­ export boom evaporated, leaving only a mountain of debt; in the mid-­1990s, the nation’s overvalued peso collapsed immediately after nafta was signed, and countless millions of dollars of portfolio (“hot money”) investment fled the country at the stroke of a keyboard. The post-­9/11 economic downturn in the United States was particularly onerous for Mexico. Then, in 2008, the precipitous recession brought on by overleveraged U.S. financial institutions created economic havoc south of the border. More recently, Trump’s aggressive “America First” agenda, epitomized by all manner of threats linked to immigration and his “Great Wall,” have wrought havoc with the value of the Mexican peso. Indeed, there have been few periods in Mexico’s national history that have not been characterized as times of “crisis.” Of course, for those Mexicans who do not share the “developmentalist” vision of their leaders, 4  Introduction

or whose families’ agrarian livelihoods and mores have been disrupted by it, terms such as crisis (and modernity itself) take on a very different meaning. While Mexico is certainly a unique and extraordinary country, it is also true that the multistranded examination of Mexican history, culture, and politics presented in this volume can shed a good deal of light on central problems facing nations in the global South as a whole. Specifically, Mexico provides a compelling case study for examining such nations’ historical struggles to achieve effective modes of governance and sustainable economic growth. Although until recently many Americans often took political stability and economic growth for granted, throughout most of the global South—­ and certainly in Latin America—­two hundred years after the achievement of formal independence there is still no tried-­a nd-­true formula for political stability and broad-­based economic development. Why is this the case? Why, on virtually every economic and social indicator, are the Latin American nations (not to mention most of their African and Asian counterparts) so far behind the United States, which won its independence at roughly the same time? Why—­despite the dazzling fortunes of a favored few—­is the gap between North and South apparently widening, notwithstanding all the optimistic forecasts that were made at the onset of nafta and the market-­d riven “New World Order”? And, finally, what roles have the United States and other foreign powers played in the quest of countries such as Mexico to attain effective, representative governance and balanced economic development? The themes explored by our contributors will provide grist for discussion and debate of these and many other questions. At the core of the volume lies an attempt to convey something of the multiple histories of Mexico’s development as a nation—­h istories “from above,” “from below,” and in between; histories shaped by forces and agents inside and outside the country. Unlike much of the prevailing pedagogical literature on Mexico, The Mexico Reader seeks to show how these histories intersect, illuminating the tension between long-­r unning processes of global economic expansion, nation-­state formation, and the responses these larger trends have produced at the grassroots level. In this sense, the volume will likely pose a challenge to many introductory texts on Mexico, since the linkages between the state’s political-­ economic and cultural projects of transformation, on the one hand, and local equations of resistance, accommodation, negotiation, and popular empowerment, on the other, are at once central to the Mexican past and still not adequately understood. Thus, this volume seeks to integrate political-­economy and cultural approaches in an effort to understand the past and present of a complex society and tease out the manner in which the former has shaped the latter. While we strive to present a broad range of perspectives and eschew reductionist renditions of history, such as overwrought theories of “imperialism” or “dependency,” we also seek to avoid a “postmodern carnival of polyphony.” 9 Introduction  5

This anthology examines a country whose history is bound up with what Mexico’s late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz famously described as “cycles of conquest.” 10 Not for nothing, then, do we take pains to examine the structures of power and privilege—­caste and class, ethno-­racial, gendered, and generational—­that have undergirded Mexican society. Some of the readings focus on enduring forms of class exploitation; others suggest how gender ideologies interlock with hierarchies of class, race, and ethnicity, giving the lie to the kind of unitary notions of Mexican-­ness that postrevolutionary state builders advanced throughout the twentieth century. The collection underscores that class oppression does not eliminate ethno-­racial, gendered, or generational identities, though it may speak through them with important consequences for collective political action. The volume also demonstrates that although it is fashionable these days to bash Marxian theories of imperialism and dependency—­and, to be sure, their simple correlation of “Third World” ills with First World domination often caricatures more than it explains—­foreign intervention runs throughout the course of Mexican history and has been an unmistakable factor in the nation’s poverty and internal conflicts. Guided by these larger questions, goals, and assumptions, our criteria for selecting pieces for this anthology have been relatively straightforward. First, we have sought to evoke a variety of actors and environments, so that the patterned complexity of muchos Méxicos will emerge vividly over the centuries, in a manner that inflects the country’s class, ethno-­racial, gender, generational, regional, and ideological axes of difference. Second, we have put a premium on Mexican voices that are of critical importance but often inaccessible to English-­speaking readers. Many of the selections, therefore, appear for the first time in translation. Third, we have made every effort to avoid readings that are arcane or overly technical, or require extensive previous knowledge of a given topic. Most of the pieces we have chosen were originally written for a general audience; each, we hope, will be successful in clarifying issues, piquing interest, and stimulating thought. Finally, the new edition has sought to introduce readers to new topics and approaches to Mexican history and affairs in recent decades, particularly a greater interest in ethnicity and race, gender and sexuality, immigration, health and medicine, narcoviolence, and the meaning of democracy. The introduction of new material has obliged us to “retire” some selections from the original edition and to pare down others. Most of the readings are relatively short, but we have included a final section offering suggestions for further reading for those who wish to delve more deeply. The timing of this anthology’s second edition, like the volume’s initial appearance in 2002, is quite propitious. The last two decades have witnessed watershed elections (in 2000 and 2018) that have roughly coincided with the publication of The Mexico Reader’s two editions. We have made an effort, 6  Introduction

particularly in the new volume’s last two sections—­on the Mexico-­U.S. border and the transition from a so-­called perfect dictatorship to a besieged democracy, respectively—­to take stock of these tumultuous decades that have critically reoriented Mexican society. The first edition followed closely upon the historic elections of July 2000, in which the virtual political monopoly of Mexico’s ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (pri)—­long threatened by the growing assertiveness of nongovernmental organizations, indigenous rebels, opposition forces on the right and left, and a public weary of crisis and corruption—­was definitively broken. Unfortunately, the years that followed have brought Mexico’s nascent democracy to the breaking point, prompting a succession of right-­and left-­of-­center parties (including, briefly, an allegedly new version of the pri), and an array of movements in civil society to attempt to reshape or at least stabilize Mexico in the face of widening social inequality, burgeoning narcoviolence, and growing corruption and impunity. The year 2018 seemed to mark a defining moment, as Andrés Manuel López Obrador (better known by his acronym, AMLO), became Mexico’s first leftist president in more than seven decades, since Lázaro Cárdenas’s administration in the late 1930s. His renovating government appeared to represent the last wave of Latin America’s reformist Pink Tide, which had significantly ebbed over the course of the preceding decade. Yet as this volume went into production amid the covid pandemic, it remains to be seen whether AMLO’s administration—­still benefiting from the popularity of his resounding electoral victory and controlling both chambers of Congress—­w ill mark a genuine break from the past or succumb to the same structural legacies and political-­economic and conjunctural problems that plagued his more conservative predecessors. Unfortunately, so much that we read and hear about Mexico these days comes to us in the heat of the moment—­in polemical, sometimes xenophobic sound bites served up in a climate of fear about Mexico and much of the global South. These sound bites and images emanate from the mainstream press, Congress, Hollywood, partisan cable tv and talk radio, social media, and (last but sadly not least in recent years) the White House. Typically they single out the activities of “illegal aliens,” or the epidemic of drugs, or border violence, vulnerability to terrorism, and homeland insecurity. Sometimes they belittlingly refer to Mexico as a “failed state,” or as a society that sends us its dregs—­murderers, rapists, and “bad hombres.” Or they emphasize the loss of American jobs due to nafta and more recently proposed trade pacts. Of course, stripped of hype and hyperbole, most of these polemical images and sound bites gesture to real and threatening problems. But what we hope to accomplish in this volume is to embed these preoccupations in meaningful context: particularly in the historical context of unequal yet interdependent relations between Mexico and the United States, and in the structural inequalities and differences that have always divided Mexicans themselves. Introduction  7

In this manner we hope to introduce a new generation of North Americans to their southern neighbor in a way that will make them at once more sympathetic toward Mexico’s historical problems and more appreciative of its cultural richness and transformative potential. The book contains nine parts. Part I examines the theme of mexicanidad. It inquires into the reasons behind the national obsession with “Mexican-­ ness” and chronicles the attempts by generations of thinkers and politicians to celebrate or deconstruct the national essence, to find some sort of Mexican archetype. While consensus on the issue is obviously impossible, more certain is the construction or politicization of “national character” by the postrevolutionary state and its successors to legitimize their rule. Parts II through V examine Mexico’s history from pre-­Columbian times through the consolidation of the Mexican revolution at the conclusion of the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas in 1940. The country’s historical evolution has profoundly influenced present-­day Mexico and will powerfully shape the nation’s prospects in the twenty-­fi rst century. These sections are designed to be of interest in themselves, but they also foreground the themes we take up in parts VI through IX, which are almost entirely dedicated to Mexico since 1940. These final sections, which focus on the contradictions and costs of postrevolutionary modernization, the rise of civil society (particularly since 1968), and the multiple challenges that Mexico’s fledgling democracy has faced since the once-­hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party was defeated at the ballot box in 2000, are designed to resonate with one another. They are also intended to provoke discussion about the complicated relations between a new Mexico—­a nd a new United States—­whose citizens, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai aptly put it, are no longer as “tightly territorialized [and] spatially bounded,” and where such fundamental categories as “foreign” and “domestic” become increasingly blurred.11 Notes 1. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, translated by J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1963), 232–35. More of Díaz del Castillo’s classic eyewitness account appears in part III of this volume. 2. José Miranda, Humboldt y México (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1962). 3. Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920–1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992). 4. Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, eds., Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); see especially the editors’ introduction, “Assembling the Fragments: Writing a Cultural History of Mexico since 1940,” 3–22, and the essay by Zolov, “Discovering a Land ‘Mysterious and Obvious’: The Renarrativizing of Postrevolutionary Mexico,” 234–72. 5. This promotion was aired frequently on New York radio stations in 2000.

8  Introduction

6. Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), ix–xi. 7. Lesley Byrd Simpson, Many Mexicos, 4th ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 8. Guillermo Bonfils Batalla, México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization, trans. Philip Dennis (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). A selection from México Profundo appears in part I of this volume. 9. Orin Starn, Carlos Iván Degregori, and Robin Kirk, eds., The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 9. 10. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings, trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachael Phillips Belash (New York: Grove, 1985). A selection from The Labyrinth of Solitude appears in part I of this volume. 11. Arjun Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 1991), 191; see also Gilbert M. Joseph, “Close Encounters: Towards a New Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations,” in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvadore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 3–4.

Introduction  9

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I The Search for “Lo Mexicano”

Since the concepts of “nationality” and “nationalism” came into existence some two centuries ago, it has been a common presumption that different peoples exhibit characteristics peculiarly their own. The term nation itself, which is derived from the Latin natio, meaning “birth,” suggests something innate and inevitable, traits shaped by genetics and environment—­traits that can be analyzed, but changed only with great difficulty. Mexicans, perhaps more than most peoples, have long been preoccupied with defining what it means to be Mexican, such that the terms lo mexicano and mexicanidad have become standard intellectual fare. Yet musings on the topic have seldom been celebrations of Mexico’s vibrant national spirit; they have more typically been tortured reflections on the country’s apparent inability to emerge from a prolonged and troubled adolescence. Some have sought explanations in the social structures inherited from centuries of colonial rule; others have located the problem in the unique attributes of the Mexican “race.” Among the first to adopt this latter perspective were foreigners like U.S. Minister Joel Poinsett, who held that the Mexican “race” was weak and degenerate. The advent of modern psychology led to more nuanced and sympathetic analyses, such as those of Octavio Paz and his mentor, the psychologist Samuel Ramos. These have been criticized for exaggerating supposed personality traits and reifying culture. Recent “postmodern” thinkers tend likewise to be skeptical of analyses that find unalterable attributes of different nationalities, since nationality often comes to seem a polite code word for race. Race, these thinkers claim, is more a “social construction” than a matter of biology. Moreover, the postrevolutionary Mexican state seized upon some of the supposed elements of “mexicanidad” to legitimize and sustain its rule, adding an unfortunate political dimension to the question. While consensus on so slippery an issue is clearly impossible, we present in this section several classic statements on the topic of the Mexican character. Fundamentally, most seek to account for the apparent fact that Mexico has not quite become “modern,” positing characteristics that are profoundly at odds with those commonly attributed to North Americans or Northern Europeans. The penultimate selection, by Gloria Anzaldúa, a noted Mexican 11

American poet and one of the pioneers of Chicano studies and postcolonial feminist theory, brings an assertive transborder and gendered dimension to mexicanidad, a literature largely known for its masculinist sensibilities. The final reading by Alma Guillermoprieto, written as the Mexican government campaigned to enter the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s, poses a crucial question: In this age of globalization of capital and media, could the image of “lo mexicano”—­whether we view it as a good or bad thing—­be threatened finally with extinction?

12  The Search for “Lo Mexicano”

The Mexican Character Joel Poinsett

Today, Joel Roberts Poinsett’s chief claim to fame in the United States is as the man who brought home the Mexican “Christmas Eve flower,” which came to be called the poinsettia. Despite this innocent association, however, few figures in Mexican history have excited quite such passionate controversy. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Poinsett (1779–1851) first became involved in Latin American affairs in 1811 as special envoy from President James Monroe to Chile. Returning to the United States in 1813, he pursued a political career in the South Carolina legislature and in the U.S. House of Representatives, to which he was elected in 1821. In 1822 he traveled to the Mexico of Agustín Iturbide and authored a short book on the subject, Notes on Mexico. In 1825 he was appointed U.S. Minister to Mexico. He later would serve as secretary of war in the cabinet of President Martin Van Buren. From the outset of his tenure as minister to Mexico, Poinsett was an outspoken proponent of U.S.-­style liberalism: decentralized, constitutional, republican government; anticlericalism; and free trade. A substantial number of influential Mexicans found such activity decidedly pernicious, and their antipathy toward him was exacerbated by the fact that the minister advocated extending the southern boundary of the United States to the Rio Grande. Poinsett found like-­minded cohorts in the York Rite Masonic Lodge, which he helped to organize in Mexico. The York Rite Masons (or Yorkinos) were rivals of the Scottish Rite Masons (or Escoceses), and the two lodges increasingly emerged as bitter, secretive political clubs. The sub rosa nature of these political organizations was conducive to conspiratorial thinking, and Conservative Escoceses became increasingly convinced that Poinsett was a subversive foreign agent seeking deliberately to weaken and undermine Mexico. As will be seen from the following excerpt from an 1829 letter to Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, Poinsett had a pessimistic view of the Mexican character and of the nation’s potential for progress. Poinsett’s generalizations might serve as a compendium of North American stereotypes of Mexicans to this day. The character of this people cannot be understood, nor the causes of their present condition be fully developed without recurring to the oppression under which they formerly laboured. It would lead you into error to compare them with the free and civilized nations of America and Europe in the Nine13

teenth Century. They started from a period nearer to the age of Charles the fifth, and it is even a matter of some doubt whether this Nation had advanced one step in knowledge and civilization, from the time of the conquest to the moment of declaring themselves Independent. No portion of the Spanish dominions in America was watched over by the Mother Country with such jealous care as Mexico. Its comparatively dense population, its extensive and fertile territory, its rich and varied productions, and especially its mineral wealth, rendered it a source of great profit to Spain; while the history of the ancient splendour of Mexico, and the glory of its conquest could not fail to enhance the value of its possession in the eyes of that chivalrous people. In order to preserve that possession every precaution was taken that human prudence could devise to prevent the access of strangers to Mexico and to keep the people in profound ignorance of their own strength and resources as well as of their relative position with regard to other Nations. . . . The nobility and gentry then as now, inhabited spacious hotels, built after the fashion of those of the mother Country, solid and substantial; but still more destitute of all comfort or convenience. Their style of living was not generous or hospitable, although they sometimes gave costly and ostentatious entertainments. From their absurd pretensions to rank and from their unmeaning jealousy of each other, there never did exist that social intercourse among the higher orders, which in every other Country forms the chief charm of life. Here every man of distinction considered it beneath his dignity to visit his friends or neighbours, and remained in his own house, where in a large gloomy apartment dimly lighted and miserably furnished he received a few visitors of inferior rank who formed his tertulia [social gathering] of every night. It is not to be wondered at therefore that the sons of these men, equally uneducated with themselves, fled from the gloomy mansions of their fathers to the Theatre, the coffee houses or the gambling table; and this circumstance united to the absence of all excitement to industry, from the preference given by the Council of the Indies to Europeans for all appointments, rendered the Aristocracy of Mexico an ignorant and immoral race. The same state of society existed among the higher orders of the clergy and marked their character in the same unfavorable manner. The regular clergy, formed from the very dregs of the people, was then and is now disgustingly debauched and ignorant. They have lost the influence they formerly possessed over the common people, and so sensible are they of the universal contempt which they have brought upon themselves by their unworthy conduct, that they would not oppose a thorough reform of their orders if the Government had courage to attempt it. But what more particularly distinguishes the condition of the people in the Spanish colonies is the character of the labouring classes. That portion of America conquered by Spain was inhabited by a people in a high state of civilization for the age in which they lived. The higher classes fell [as] a sacri14  Joel Poinsett

fice to the cruelty and rapacity of their Conquerors, and the common people were reduced to a state of the most abject slavery. The existence of this degraded race had a singular effect upon the character of the Spanish Settler. The poorest white man scorned to be placed on a level with the unfortunate Indian. His colour ennobled him, and Spaniards and their descendants would have perished rather than degrade their caste in America by working in the field, or by following any other laborious occupation in which the Indians are habitually employed. Here therefore is wanting that portion of a community which forms the strength of every nation, but especially of a Republic, a free and virtuous peasantry. The Indians cannot as yet be regarded in that light. They are laborious, patient and submissive, but are lamentably ignorant. They are emerging slowly from the wretched state to which they had been reduced; but they must be educated and released from the gross superstition under which they now labour before they can be expected to feel an interest in public affairs. The only political feeling these people now possess is a bitter hatred of the Spaniards or Gachupines as they call them, a hatred which has never ceased to exist, and which has been kept alive both by tradition and by constantly recurring instances of cruelty and oppression. Less attention has been paid by this Government to the establishment of primary schools than in any other part of Spanish America. This has been a lamentable oversight, for not only do the great mass of the population require to be educated in order that the real principles of a representative Government may be carried fully into operation; but to inspire them with a decent pride and to induce them to more constant labour and to employ their earnings in rendering their habitations comfortable and in purchasing clothing for themselves and their families. At present seven eighths of the population live in wretched hovels destitute of the most ordinary conveniences. Their only furniture a few coarse mats to sit and sleep on, their food indian corn, pepper and pulse [legumes], and their clothing miserably coarse and scanty. It is not that the low price of labor prevents them from earning a more comfortable subsistence in spite of the numerous festivals in each year, but they either gamble away their money, or employ it in pageants of the Catholic Church, in which pagan and Christian rites are strangely mingled. All these evils, if not cured entirely, would be greatly mitigated by education. . . . It appears then that the successful precautions taken by Spain to prevent all intercourse between Mexico and other Countries prevented the light of knowledge from penetrating into this Country. Not only were the Mexicans deprived of the means of keeping pace with the rapid progress of knowledge in other Countries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; but the peculiar circumstances in which they were placed scarcely allowed them to retain the station they occupied at the time of the conquest. The emigrants from Spain who alone were permitted to settle in the Country were among the most ignorant and vicious of that people, who are notoriously a century The Mexican Character  15

behind the rest of Christian Europe. They were for the most part the favorites of great men, and came to lord over the creole, to occupy all the offices of honor and emolument and to keep the natives in subjection. As has been already remarked, one mode of effecting this object was to keep them even more ignorant than they were themselves. They were assisted in their efforts to this effect by a variety of causes. The want of means of acquiring knowledge, the absence of all excitement to exertion, the facility of procuring the means of subsistence almost without labour, a mild and enervating climate and their constant intercourse with the aborigines, who were and still are degraded to the very lowest class of human beings, all contributed to render the Mexicans a more ignorant and debauched people than their ancestors had been. Another cause operated still more strongly to produce this effect. The puerile ceremonies of their worship, and the excessive ignorance and shocking profligacy of the clergy. The creoles were taught from their infancy to revere their pastors as Superior beings and it is not therefore surprising that their pernicious example should have produced such melancholy results. When therefore we examine the actual condition of this people, we ought always to bear in mind the point from which they set out. They were in every respect, far behind the mother Country which is notoriously very inferior in moral improvement to all other Nations. They were not even equal to the other Spanish colonies in America, because their comparative importance and their vicinity to the United States rendered Spain more vigilant in preventing all intercourse with foreigners as well as the introduction of all works, which could enlighten their minds and inspire them with liberal ideas.

16  Joel Poinsett

The Cosmic Race José Vasconcelos

José Vasconcelos (1882–1959) was among the most important and influential Mexican intellectuals of the twentieth century. His childhood was spent partly on the U.S.Mexico border, where he attended schools in Eagle Pass, Texas. During his formative years, Vasconcelos developed a profound suspicion of Americans, whom he viewed as crassly pragmatic, arrogant, shallow, aggressive, and lacking in spirituality. Undoubtedly, he was also offended by the fact that many Americans continued to endorse ideas like those espoused earlier in the century by their compatriot Joel Poinsett. Like certain other Latin Americans of the turn of the century—­such as the Uruguayan philosopher José Enrique Rodó, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, and the Cuban patriot José Martí—­Vasconcelos’s thought developed in part as a reaction against North America and its materialistic values. He felt that Latin Americans must avoid imitating American culture, and that in order to do that successfully they would need a guiding philosophy, one that celebrated their strengths and virtues. In this spirit, he argued that the Latin American mestizo constituted a new race, a “cosmic race,” which combined the virtues of Indians and Europeans. This, Vasconcelos believed, would be the race of the future. While Vasconcelos’s theory turned the white supremacist racism of the day on its head, it remains at heart a racist theory. By imputing inevitable characteristics to the various races of the earth, Vasconcelos engages in rather reckless stereotyping. His romantic notion of the spiritual essence of his people and of the soullessness of Anglo-­Saxon culture, together with his increasing bitterness at the course of events in Mexico, would lead him to embrace fascism and anti-­Semitism during World War II. For all his failings, Vasconcelos remains a uniquely engaging figure. Active in the Mexican revolution from its earliest days, he would serve as Mexico’s secretary of education, and in this capacity he acted with boundless energy and idealism. An advocate of Indian literacy, he greatly increased the presence of education in the countryside; his Ministry of Public Education produced massive numbers of inexpensive workbooks and textbooks; and the ministry’s Department of Fine Arts sponsored the work of some of Mexico’s greatest modern artists, including the muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as musicians Manuel M. Ponce and Julián Carrillo. At odds with the Mexican government after 1924, he

17

ran unsuccessfully for president in 1929 in an energetic campaign plagued by violence and fraud on the part of the newly formed official government party. Greece laid the foundations of Western or European civilization; the white civilization that, upon expanding, reached the forgotten shores of the American continent in order to consummate the task of re-­civilization and re-­population. Thus we have the four stages and the four racial trunks: the Black, the Indian, the Mongol, and the White. The latter, after organizing itself in Europe, has become the invader of the world, and has considered itself destined to rule, as did each of the previous races during their time of power. It is clear that domination by the whites will also be temporary, but their mission is to serve as a bridge. The white race has brought the world to a state in which all human types and cultures will be able to fuse with each other. The civilization developed and organized in our times by the whites has set the moral and material basis for the union of all men into a fifth universal race, the fruit of all the previous ones and amelioration of everything past. . . . Let us recognize that it was a disgrace not to have proceeded with the cohesion demonstrated by those to the north, that prodigious race which we are accustomed to lavish with insults only because they have won each hand at the secular fight. They triumph because they join to their practical talents the clear vision of a great destiny. They keep present the intuition of a definite historical mission, while we get lost in the labyrinth of verbal chimeras. It seems as if God Himself guided the steps of the Anglo-­Saxon cause, while we kill each other on account of dogma or declare ourselves atheists. How those mighty empire builders must laugh at our groundless arrogance and Latin vanity! They do not clutter their mind with the Ciceronian weight of phraseology, nor have they in their blood the contradictory instincts of a mixture of dissimilar races, but they committed the sin of destroying those races, while we assimilated them, and this gives us new rights and hopes for a mission without precedent in History. For this reason, adverse obstacles do not move us to surrender, for we vaguely feel that they will help us to discover our way. Precisely in our differences, we find the way. If we simply imitate, we lose. If we discover and create, we shall overcome